Rebirth
April 15th, 2009 by Karen
This past week, Stephen has never been far from my thoughts. Because of the amazing generosity of so many family, friends and strangers, he and Rosemary were able to travel to Houston last week for the battery of tests to once again battle the Hodgkins and Non-Hodgkins lymphoma still attacking his body.
If all goes well and he stays healthy, he will go back in another week or two for the medication and treatment to finally kill it and put him squarely in remission.
Knowing Stephen and his profound affect on my little brother and all his friends, the fact that this travel occurred during Easter Week is well, nothing short of symbolic. The last three years Steve has traveled a long road with his friends by his side…being their rock when they doubted, sharing his own fears and being lifted up by them in turn, losing faith and rediscovering it over and over. Taking chemo and radiation treatments, bone marrow and stem cell transplants with short lived success. And then this solitary chance arose, a place that has done so much good for so many in his situation. An opportunity to overcome the death sitting in his chest. He took this journey to Houston akin to Christ’s own trip to Jerusalem. It’s a trip he knows will change everything. His friends celebrated with him and rejoiced, but I know that in each of them is that deep rooted fear that none dare voice…the fear that he is slipping away where they can not go.
Everyone who knows Stephen has high expectations that he will finally be safe and free and he and his friends can go back to joking and playing and being the young twenty-somethings they are and talking about baseball and barbeques instead of these suddenly somber men who use multi-syllabic medical terms in their everyday chatter.
That medicine they are making this week in Houston for Stephen will make him violently ill and so weak he will not be able to have visitors. He won’t be able to see his family or cling to Rosemary’s hand for comfort. He will be denied the creature comforts of home in the interest of sterility and his decimated immune system. He will be completely and utterly exhausted from the retching and the pain of feeling his insides torn apart.
In that IV bag is liquid death.
But in its plastic confines is Stephen’s final chance for rebirth in this world.
Posted in Family, Life, Uncategorized | 3 Comments
More Art!
December 8th, 2008 by Karen
So last night I was surprised by my friend Kai with more gift art, this time of my character Lydia Chapman. It’s a quick rough sketch, but it looks awesome!
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Blog World Expo in Las Vegas
September 21st, 2008 by Karen
This year, I’ve had the opportunity to attend the 2008 BlogWorldExpo in Las Vegas, NV. Also happenin at the same time is the GodBlogCon which my business partner spoke at this morning. Overall, the programing has been decent and solid. My main two complaints are no on-site lunch and the incredible amount of rude people I’ve seen in sessions. I’ve never seen so many people answer their cell phones in the middle of sessions and actually take the calls. It’s rude, it’s egotistical and just incredibly obnoxious.
Other than that though, the Blog World conference has been remarkably nice. I’ve mostly attended the monetization sessions and they’ve been really informative. I have noticed though that affiliate marketing is a completely new topic to many of these bloggers. I’m considering applying to speak at the next one with an affiliate marketing 101 topic. We’ll see….
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Why?
April 10th, 2008 by Karen
I find it a terribly cruel and cold twist of fate that a wonderful young man I know is suffering from Hodgkins. He’s faced it head on and battled hard, taking a long series of chemotheraphy treatments. His test results just came back and there’s been little change so he’s moving on to radiation therapy. Why? Why? Why? I don’t understand. He’s a good man, faithful to God, caring to his young wife and friends. There’s no reason under the sun that I can see that he should have to suffer the trials of Job to prove the depths of his faith. My heart breaks for him…
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My Chaucer
April 4th, 2008 by Karen
When I originally had to learn the Old English pronunciation of the first 42 lines of Geoffery Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in Kathy Kernberger’s Honors English class at college, I wasn’t really sure when or if I would ever find it useful again. You’d be surprised at how many times this seems to come up in my life.
When one of my friends on The Cape Radio hosted the Poetry Slam last week, it only seemed fitting to record it and send it in as my offering.
(Siderant… the general media enjoys portraying gamers as uncouth, slovenly idiots not fit for public appearance. In my three years of playing City of Heroes / City of Villains, I have found quite the contrary. The folks I play with are incredibly educated, successful, well read, well traveled, artsy people who often simply feel isolated from the lack of reasonably equal companionship locally. The amount of real-life related information that is shared in private conversations in game is massive. We support each other’s business endeavors in impromptu brainstorming sessions and resource referrals. We let others know of job opportunities in their areas of expertise. We comfort each other’s sorrows and rejoice in each other’s joys. We are not pasty, sun-deprived, pimply 14 year old boys living on Doritos and Mountain Dew, tyvm. )
As I noted below, I was really worried about how well it would be received and I was ecstatic at the response. Take a listen for yourself and tell me what you think:
Excerpt from The Canterbury Tales by Geoffery Chaucer
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Thin Mints are evil
April 2nd, 2008 by Karen
Ok, this is a bit of a rant, but you know those Girl Scout cookies? They’re all fine and good…EXCEPT THIN MINTS! Oh sure, they seem innocent enough, but you open the box and find so very many of them. All the other types of cookies that Girl Scouts sell come in much smaller quantities. Samoas? Only 12. Peanut Butter Patties? 20. But Thin Mints…a box of Thin Mints has 32 cookies.
Thirty-two blissful, chestnut colored disks of crispy mint perfection.
Can you eat just one? I can’t. But I can eat the whole stupid box. Evil I tell you. Evil!
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Learning courage
April 1st, 2008 by Karen
Ok, I’ll admit it. I am not someone who enjoys public speaking overmuch. In fact, it basically freaks me out. When I was a kid, I used to get woozy and pass out just getting in front of my class doing a bookreport. The funny thing is, I’ve always enjoyed performing arts and have been involved in band, choirs, and doing plays and musicals since second grade. Something about doing it -alone- I find immensely terrifying.
Unfortunately, this irrational fear is personally crippling and I’ve made a committment to myself to move past it as quickly as possible. To that end, I’ve been participating in a few interactive events on my favorite player run radio station in City of Heroes, The Cape Radio. I submitted a poem for the Poetry slam that was on Monday evening and tonight was the City of Karaoke 3 and I submitted a song for that as well. It was stressful waiting to hear what people thought about my pieces, but I was really pleasantly surprised.
Hopefully soon, I’ll have the courage to start posting video regularly.
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Bowling for Birthdays
March 29th, 2008 by Karen
Today was Maria’s 8th birthday party and we had a complete blast. We normally have birthday parties at home, but since last year’s birthday was a bit…horrible…we relented and had her party at the local bowling alley. We wanted to make this one memorable as she’s nearly totally recovered from her shattered elbow. Praise God!
We ended up with ten bowlers from the kids in her class and a whole bunch of family. I made the cake of course and we had a vanilla cake bowling bag and a chocolate cake bowling ball, both covered in colored fondant. The kids also had pizza and soda and I think a great time was had by all.
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There and back again…
March 27th, 2008 by Karen
This past week, I actually went road-tripping with my Mom and I had an absolute blast. We went to Eastern Oregon to visit my grandmother so I could fix her computer and we could catch up a bit. It took a few days to get the computer square with the world, simply because they live in the middle of nowhere (dial-up and no wifi spots available…arg) and downloading updates for a few of her programs was a several hour process. After installing a significant memory upgrade, updating her programs, and making a few accessibility adjustments, it was good to go. While we waited for things to download, we had a fantastic time, just being with my Grandma.
My Grandpa Bill passed away in December of 2006, and every time we’ve been there since, I’ve had kids in tow and there have been a myriad of other things I had to focus on. This time, we actually got to VISIT. Grandma took us all over town, showing us off to her friends and was infinitely proud that her granddaughter was fixing her computer. We went to several luncheons and potlucks and out to coffee with her friends everymorning. I made two lemon merengue pies (they were always my Grandpa’s favorite) and even made her some Easter eggs since I knew we would be headed home the day before. It was awesome talking with my Grandma about all sorts of stuff that I never knew, simply because there wasn’t time before and we were always interupted. I also spent a fair amount of time scanning family photographs although I didn’t make much of a dent since Grandma is a photographer and former newspaper editor and there are boxes of photos in every nook and cranny.
Mom and I stayed up late every night just talking about life, family, work, her teaching, affiliate programming, my new business, just about everything under the sun. It was really a great trip and I can’t wait to do it again!!
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New Facebook privacy controls
March 18th, 2008 by Karen
Facebook announced today that Wednesday morning ( March 18 ), they will be rolling out new privacy controls. Essentially, this will allow Facebook users to create “walls” between their business and personal lives. It will utilize the “friends lists” feature that they launched in December. While I’m uncertain that I will really be using this as I consider a fair amount of my business associates to be friends and try to live my life so I have little I would be embarassed to have as public knowledge, I know there are a lot of folks out there that would prefer to keep things hidden from the spotlight social networking can create.
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